Gadgetory

whoa whoa hold on a second Linus you can't do that actually yes we can and today we're gonna be showing you guys step-by-step how to build a single Tower that can run two independent gaming rigs complete with their own keyboards mice and even video cards out of the same box off the same motherboard and the same CPU even so hit that like button if you guys are super amped on this topic and stay tuned this is going to be a wild ride so let's start with the inspiration for this build coolermaster came to us and they were like hey we want a sponsor like a a bill that you guys do in the mastercase 5 it's all modular and there's upgradeable parts and you can like put a lot of hard drives in or you could not put a lot of hard drives in you could put them out of board in or lots of graphics cards or just a few graphics cards you can build like anything you want in there use your imagination I was kind of like okay well my imagination is that I've always kind of wanted to do like something with virtualization and like two gaming rigs running off of one computer because when you think about it looking at the rest of the hardware we're using here and we do this all the time we build like these super overpowered machines with like eight processing cores 32 gigs of RAM we've got like enough USB ports to choke a stallion you got two graphics cards you throw a couple SSDs and a couple hard drives and you go well holy crap you got like two computers worth of hardware in the thing why can't you just legitimately run two computers off of it so that is exactly what we'll be doing so our hardware list is a coolermaster mastercase pro 5 we've got a v8 50 power supply with an Epson 240 M water cooler we're using an Asus x99 deluxe motherboard with an 8 core Core i7 59 60 X Extreme Edition 32 gigs of Corsair Vengeance lpx memory we've got a GTX Titan X a GTX 780 Ti and some of this is a ninety 500 GS okay I'll explain why we need that later as well as two Intel 730 series 480 gig SSDs and two Seagate three terabyte hard drives and what are the hard drives for for a gaming rig great question we are going to be putting not one not two but three operating systems on this machine two copies of Windows 10 and one copy of lime tech unreadable be a Nath's and it will be two gaming rigs at the same time so let's start by building the machine so the biggest way that we leverage the modularity of the mastercase 5 was to reconfigure the drive cages our plan was to use two SSDs and two hard drives which gave us a lot of space in the front of the case for a large water cooling system however in the event that we wanted more emphasis on the NAS portion of our build and we wanted to have a lot more hard drives for storage we could easily use a different cooler weather mounted in the rear or the top or just an air cooler on the CPU and fill up the front of the case with drives okay so that wasn't the most detailed physical build guide we've ever done but it wasn't intended to be the hard part today is component selection and software configuration so if you want to know more about how this case works and all of its modularity then check out the review video that we did here no we're gonna talk about why we picked the other parts that we did first number one you will need a CPU with virtualization technology so this will be called VT - D which is being able to pass through a PCI device to a virtual machine very important for passing through our video cards and the second is V T - X and this is all applying to Intel CPUs and that is the ability to support virtualization at all step number two configure your graphics cards appropriately for each gaming machine that you want to run off of your computer you will need one dedicated gaming capable graphics card then in addition to that you will need another GPU for on raid to initialize when it's booting up so this could be your onboard graphics or in our case we installed a 9500 GS and this is important in the top PCI Express slot for it to grab number three is other devices that you want each machine to have access to in our case both of our monitors are going to have support for an audio pass-through jack on the bottom of the monitor so we can use the HDMI or DisplayPort audio off of our graphics card if we wanted to run USB sound cards that would be an option as well and would give both players the ability to use microphone USB headsets could work as well but with any USB devices you may have noticed our peripherals are all completely different you will have to use different models of USB devices more on this later and finally for storage we've gone with two SSDs this gives us redundancy effectively raid one of high enough capacity that you can split the capacity between the two machines so our two 480 gig drives are actually turning into 240 gigs per box of redundant safe storage and then our hard drives again we've gone with two hard drives because if you go with more than two then you're going to hurt your right performance and failover if one drive dies all the data is there through butter FS is enough for us for these purposes and we'd like to have the additional right speed we can do about a hundred plus megabytes per second to our array so two hard drives for redundancy again high enough capacity that we can effectively split them getting one and a half terabytes of redundant storage per virtual machine step number one format your USB Drive in fat32 calling it on raid in all caps download the latest version of on read off of the lime - technology comm website copy all of the files from your download onto your formatted USB disk then right click make bootable and run as administrator and press Enter you can now eject your USB and put it into your computer step 2 make sure you're running the latest bios for your motherboard change all SATA devices to a HCI mode and enable virtualization technology in our case it was under advanced CPU configuration and advanced system agent configuration within the BIOS now what you can do is use your boot override to boot to the USB Drive that you just created once the system's booted up navigate to HTTP colon slash slash tower in the internet browser of another computer on the same network at this stage you can decide whether you want to purchase a key or get a trial key which is limit two three storage devices and stops working after 60 days it's a good way to try it out though step 4 hit info in the top right and double check to make sure that hvm and iommu are enabled if they're not you may need to reconfigure something in your motherboard BIOS to get your virtualization running with that out of the way go to main change your hard drive slots to something lower add your two hard drives using the dropdowns to parity and disk one then change your cache slots we're using these for our SSDs - - and add both of the SSDs to cache drives next go to tools then system devices make sure your devices are showing up correctly we're looking for our graphics cards anything that starts with 0 0 is built into the motherboard while things that start with other numbers or letters are generally going to be discrete devices so here we can see all three of our graphics cards are showing up correctly note this PCI device number at the beginning here this will be important for the next step now scroll down to iommu groups find those devices so in our case here we are here are video cards and ensure that they are showing up in separate groups if they're not you may need to enable a workaround but fortunately thanks to the way that Isis has implemented things on this motherboard they are all showing up in separate groups and it will be easy to assign these devices to separate VMs next go to settings and identification here we can change the name of our server which is how it'll show up on the network so I'm going to call it on Linus and with this change made we're going to have to renew 8 to our administration console I would also recommend at this stage navigating to users and adding a password to the root user so that not just anyone can dink around in the administration console next go to settings then network settings and change obtain IP address automatically to know it's recommended just for the sake of ease of use later on down the road that you set a static IP so that it's easy to navigate to this administration consult from another computer on the network now go back to main and start the array once you see the green array started in the bottom left hand corner click the yes I want to do this button next to format and click format it'll take a while for your drives to format and the more drives you have the longer it'll take now that our format is complete go to shares and we are actually going to create using the add share button for different shares note carefully the settings that we're using for them and replicate these exactly our iso's share is for installing our VMS and the associated drivers our V disks share is for the boot drives of our VMs they are running purely on SSD our docker folder is for if we want to add applications like Plex server to our unraised server install as opposed to our Windows VMs and our final share our AV disks is for mass storage drives that are on the hard drives for our virtual machines now go to settings VM manager change enable VMs to yes change the ISO library to your ISO directory that you just created change the default Network Bridge to be r0 then press apply you'll know this worked because you'll see a VMs tab at the top next go to the VMS tab and click add vm name your vm and give it a description and if you want it to automatically boot up when you fire up on raid then change auto start to yes select the appropriate operating system for Windows 10 you can select Windows 8.1 and that will work just fine and change from basic view to advanced view select the number of course you want for your VM in our case we're going to pick 8 of our virtual course so that's for real course and for hyper-threaded ones and then select how much memory you want for your vm I'm gonna give each of my VMs around 12 gigs of RAM don't change max memory just initial no to obtain an operating system install ISO for Windows 10 you can simply download it from Microsoft and copy it to the ISOs folder then for your Verte I O drivers ISO click this link and use the forth download so latest Verte ISO win ISO and copy that directly to the iso's folder on your network in our case we can type backslash backslash on linus and navigate to is OS with those downloaded we can select them in the drop down and set a primary v disk location in this case user v disks choose a primary v disk size I'm gonna go with 200 gigs press the plus button then select for the location user array V disks and for size well let's make it one terabyte and change your graphics card to the one that you desire for this particular VM we're gonna make this our Titan X machine for sound choose the corresponding Nvidia device in the drop down or if you add additional sound cards then you can definitely do that as well make sure your network bridge is the one that you created before and finally select the peripherals you're going to be using for this particular VM once you're ready click create and the VM will start as soon as it's finished being created and this my friends is where the magic happens within a couple seconds you should see the screen illuminate and your windows install should begin just as it would if you were installing on a normal computer okay not quite normal you will need to load a driver so simply browse and go to your Verte io vio store the corresponding copy of windows so 8.1 for 10 and then the appropriate architecture so we're running 64-bit and install your storage device driver once that's done you should see both of your storage devices show up and you can install to your SSD storage device once you're dumped on the desktop there are a few more drivers you'll need to install so go to device manager and there should be three exclamation mark items update driver software browse and go to your vert I Oh disk press okay include subfolders and click Next repeat this process for each of them once that's done install your Nvidia graphics card drivers from Nvidia comm and you are pretty much ready to go you can create your second virtual machine in exactly the same way with the one exception being that you'll need to change your CPU course to course that you didn't already use for this virtual machine in cases where you want to install some additional applications on unread itself you may want to reserve one or two cores for unread and leave the rest of them allocated to your virtual machines there are a couple of more Pro tips put your PC in high performance mode disable fastboot sleep and hibernation and there's a guide over on the guru 3d forums that you'll need to follow especially if you've got an Nvidia graphics card and you're using the onboard audio to ensure that your audio doesn't get garbled it is a registry hack but it's not too complicated to follow along so this is it my friends moment of truth time both of our VMs are set to start up automatically once the system is powered on so in theory within about a minute or so we're gonna have Windows 10 running twice on one computer so on raid takes a little while to boot up give her a minute you know oh there goes okay my two virtual machines are starting other side oh oh this one's already on the desktop yes my friends there you have it mouse keyboard star wars battlefront beta this is kind of it this is the Star Wars Battlefront beta running at ultra details 1080p on two virtual machines on the same box at a hundred and six FPS on this one and a hundred and four FPS on this one yes we are getting full discrete performance on two instances of the game simultaneously so now that we've gotten this far I mean what's the fun of having a dual headed gaming box if you don't have somebody to enjoy it with let's go get Luke do you like bounce around when I think it'll show you like a cone of where they are which is red but then it'll also show you like thread shapes or there's one left behind something like the rocks or whatever is said about home they take a sec to pull up do you have regenerating health in this thing yes yeah I got an empty vehicle turret cool and a proximity bottom oh this guy has a concealed then in jetpack so that was fun and to my eye I can't tell that I'm running on a virtual machine but without objective measurements I can't quantify the difference for you guys so I've actually got Luke running our standardized battlefront benchmark which was used in our performance roundup which you guys will actually be able to check out and I think one or two days depending on how the release schedule goes to validate how our 980ti mind you it's running on three CPU physical cores versus it was running on a six core in there stacks up against running it on a dedicated machine and I think the number should be with us any moment here there we go so this is running on a 59 60 X versus on a 59 30 K which is actually a higher clock speed chip not to mention that it has all six of its cores versus only three of them and the 980ti scored 120 FPS average we got 100 and 2.5 FPS average I am feeling pretty frakking good about those results and this is at 1080p ultra so guys thank you for checking out this video if you didn't like it then come on and if you did like it hit that like button get subscribed and maybe even consider supporting us here at Linus tech tips you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can change your Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code with the instructions up there by the way we'll have links for where you can check out all of this hardware as well as unread in the video description at the link to the Linus tech tips forum where you can also contribute to us and I think that pretty much wraps it up thanks again for watching and I will see you guys next time we do a crazy project like this man this was this was this was a thing